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In one life, she never goes to Neo Domino City at all.
Her days are spent running her family’s store in the countryside, conversing with customers about the local happenings, giving advice on how much light and water to give the plants she sells. Once in a while they’ll ask her to use her deck to tell their fortunes. At night, she works on articles for the town paper, reads the news on the internet and whatever fiction novels she can find at the small library nearby. She oscillates between feeling utterly at peace and feeling utterly bored.
Some nights, Carly watches coverage of Neo Domino City. She is in awe of the skyscrapers and the bright lights. Most of all, she is captivated by what she can imagine for herself if she goes there: meeting exciting people, eating delicious food, having a career that would make her parents proud.
One day, from her laptop, she passively watches a livestream of the Fortune Cup final and is mystified by the appearance of the glowing red dragon in the stadium. It’s more interesting, she thinks, than the duel itself. So when the cameras are no longer able to show what’s happening between the dark horse from Satellite and the reigning King, Carly isn’t too bothered.
The stream finally cuts out as the King’s D-Wheel crashes. That night, she remembers the dragon’s cry and dreams of discovering its mysteries.
But her dreams stay dreams. One autumn day, one of the regular customers asks her to go on a walk together. In spite—or perhaps, because—of the teasing from her parents, she agrees. He is gentle, respectful, well-read, and likes forget-me-nots.
Their relationship proceeds as she would expect. They get married when Carly is still young, have a girl, and then, a few years later, a boy that they raise in the same town she grows up in. Her husband is the kind of man who is easy to grow old with—reliable and patient. Her parents adore their grandkids and shower them with presents every holiday season.
It’s a happy enough life, Carly thinks. She moves on to another one anyway.
—
In some lives, she finds, she gives up on looking for Jack.
When he disappears from her apartment with nary a thank you or goodbye, she doesn’t go look for him; she cuts her losses. Discouraged that now two duel champions have slipped from her fingers and feeling pressure from her boss, she decides to find another scoop entirely. In the end, she finds a story. Her job is safe.
Alternatively, in a slightly different life, she does look for Jack when he disappears. Carly searches the city for a man with his arm in a sling who is wearing an overly flashy jacket and permanent scowl on his face. As determined as she can be, it feels like a hopeless task, Neo Domino being so big and populated. Right before she might have checked the monorail station and found him struggling at using basic public transportation, she gives up. She goes home, hungry and exhausted.
The only traces of himself that Jack leaves in her apartment are a bed that is more well-made than if she had slept in it herself and a few wrinkles in the latest issue of the Neo Domino Daily News. Carly should have known, as soon as she started fantasizing about being in a love triangle with him and that other woman, that having him in her home was too good—too out of the ordinary—to last.
Still, in either life, she keeps an eye out for stories about Jack. She devours the news regularly anyways, but she pays special attention when his name comes up.
A few weeks later, she feels a bit of relief when she realizes over breakfast that however many articles and exposés she saw about the former King, none of them had direct quotes or interviews with him. Many contained statements from Director Godwin, and a couple had lines from his secretary, Mikage Sagiri, whom Carly assumes is the woman who was trying to get Jack to go back with her. But nothing from Jack Atlas himself. Somehow he eluded the media’s grasp, it seems.
That morning, even though a deadline is approaching and her article is barely half-written, even though her buttered toast is mostly burnt, she manages a smile.
—
In another life, one she’s wondered about before, she tries a little harder to go after the new King. It feels like forever ago that Carly happened upon Fudo Yusei dueling a possessed Dark Signer. When that street duelist—Dick Pitt, she remembers—grabs onto her legs and causes her to trip, she yelps a quick “Sorry!” to Dick and runs after Yusei. In high school, she was barely able to run a ten minute mile during gym class, but she sprints after him—and away from the approaching security officers—with speed she was not aware she is capable of.
While Yusei is not tall for a man, he is fit and runs quickly, so he makes for a tiring chase. She tails him as he jumps down from heights Carly would ordinarily be fearful of and enters parts of the city she can hardly recognize. Eventually, he enters an abandoned building, one that she discovers is actually being occupied by another one of the Fortune Cup entrants, her twin brother, and two other men—ostensibly his friends. That’s where she gets him.
Sometimes, while watching—or is it living?—these lives, Carly feels how she would actually feel while living them. She can feel the urgency of getting a scoop from Fudo Yusei, feel as if her heart is beating rapidly as she runs.
So when Carly sees herself get the interview she desires with Yusei, even if it requires much persistence on her part to get him to agree, her heart swells.
Her article is on the front page of the news the next day: “No card or person is useless,” is featured as a pull quote next to Yusei’s stoic face and his answers to her questions about the end of his duel with Jack and his upbringing in Satellite. Her boss compliments her for the first time. She is no longer expendable.
Carly goes home and orders expensive sushi from her favorite restaurant, the one with the best fish-to-rice ratio in the city. It’s only as she video calls her parents to tell them what happened that she—the Carly watching—realizes that in this world, this Carly thinks that the former King is yesterday’s news.
This Carly never pursues Jack at all.
—
It is a few missed lives later when Carly finds one she wants to linger in. It’s the night before she and Jack will go to Satellite and watch Yusei’s duel with Jack’s former friend, right before he disappears from her life.
When Jack tells her that she should sleep in her own bed again, that he’ll take the couch from now on, as if he has no intention of leaving anytime soon, Carly doesn’t just turn beet red and stammer a thank you. She doesn't just lie in bed alone wondering what exactly her relationship with Jack is becoming.
She musters all the courage she has, takes him by the shoulders, and gives him a peck on the cheek.
It’s only in this life that Carly learns that Jack is a clumsy kisser. In any other life, Carly would not have described Jack Atlas as a clumsy anything.
She loves him, though, and so everything he does—his attempts to be aloof and abrasive, his ability to always forget to wipe down the counters despite being neat with everything else, his tea addiction, and now, his inexperienced kissing—has become endearing to her somewhere along the line.
This Carly knows that Jack is rarely gentle and often lacks social grace despite having the appearance of royalty. He and Carly have their occasional disagreements. But he’s also the most hardworking person Carly knows, he understands what it feels like to constantly struggle to prove oneself, and he's capable of more tenderness than she can imagine.
Somehow, they manage to both not sleep in her bed that night. Jack is usually an early riser and Carly’s used to being the one who stays up later, either working on research or speed-reading another romance novel. But she and Jack spend that night on her sofa, her head against his chest, his arm around her shoulder, talking about secrets, memories, and nothing at all.
Carly wakes up the next morning in Jack’s arms with a crick in her neck. The day after, Jack is gone.
—
There is one life that Carly expects to see, but never does.
It is the one in which she had listened to Jack, the life in which she was the Carly Nagisa who did exactly what she was told, who stayed out of trouble. She imagines that in that life, she probably wouldn’t be plummeting from a twenty story building to her death.
Carly wants to see this life not out of regret, but out of curiosity. If she weren’t dead, would she see Jack come back and tell her everything, like he had promised her?
Right before her body hits the pavement, Carly wonders why she never sees this life. Is it because it’s a life she would never choose?
Or because now she knows her answer?